Michael Silberling | A Bit of Yearn Narrative With Data

This past week there was a Twitter debate between protocols about how aggregator vaults like Yearn compete versus users for yield. Discussion turned to a question about if these aggregator vaults should be seen as "whales" or as collections of smaller users? I was curious as well, and built this dashboard to try to gain insight into how many users are actually participating in Yearn vaults and how large their holdings are. Another semi-viral Twitter thread followed:

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Check out the Dune Analytics Dashboard Here and see embedded visuals at the end of the thread.

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A bit of Yearn narrative with data (@iearnfinance):

Yearn's top vaults each manage hundreds of millions of dollars, but only from a few thousand addresses.

From the outside, it may seem like this is a bunch of whales doing whale things. But in reality, it's mostly smaller fish pic.twitter.com/DpVMm4X6DC
— Michael Silberling (@MSilb7) June 19, 2021

In the top Yearn vaults, >50% of depositor's positions were less than $5k-$25k in total USD Value.

That's still a significant position size, but far from whale territory.

DAI: 57% <$5k
USDC: 47% <$10k
IronBank: 47% <$10k
stETH: 50% <$25k pic.twitter.com/O3l9IaSfzo
— Michael Silberling (@MSilb7) June 19, 2021

It's not a thread without typos:

IronBank: 47% <$25k*
stETH: 53% <$25k*
— Michael Silberling (@MSilb7) June 19, 2021

What's even more mind-bending is when you look at who some of the whales actually are.

Some are legitimate whales, but the DAI vault's largest holder is @AlchemixFi (76% of TVL) and WBTC's is @BadgerDAO (91%), which are themselves collections of more individual participants. pic.twitter.com/Yp6vjAkd4Z
— Michael Silberling (@MSilb7) June 19, 2021

While large whale depositors and DeFi apps drive up the TVL, the majority of users skew towards retail scale.

I'm interested to follow this over time (I hold YFI). If you do as well, or want to look at other vaults, check out my @DuneAnalytics dashboard: https://t.co/YFbIO3mvyE
— Michael Silberling (@MSilb7) June 19, 2021

Dashboard Embeds

'Active Addresses' = Addresses who have a >0 balance of each token
'All-time Addresses' = Any address that ever transacted with each token

Vault Token Prices were approximated based on recent transactions, and may be inaccurate. Please validate TVL against yearn.finance before sharing and report any inconsistencies. Vaults where a token price could not be calculated (yet) are displayed as -$1.

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Michael Silberling

A Bit of Yearn Narrative With Data

Twitter Thread

Dashboard Embeds

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